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13 Jun 2018 FIRST Global Challenge Hosts Global Robotics Students in Mexico City

FIRST Global, a STEM-focused international nonprofit that organizes an annual international robotics competition for high-school students from around the world, announced that the FIRST Global Challenge 2018 will convene participants from more than 160 countries, Aug. 15-18, at Mexico City’s Arena Ciudad de México to solve energy-efficiency problems with robots created by student participants.

More than 1000 high school students between ages 14 and 18 will represent their countries in the “Energy Impact” competition to improve the environment. Each team, consisting of up to five high school students, has a standard kit of parts to build a robot capable of feeding power plants to scale and build a transmission network in the most efficient way. National teams will be placed in randomly assigned alliances, which compete to achieve their goal and accrue points.

Ricardo Salinas, founder of Grupo Salinas (Mexico City, Mexico) and founding member of First Global, is the host and chairman of the organizing committee of the 2018 First Global Challenge in Mexico City. He is committed to supporting the education of young people to transform the world, promote well being, and build a better future by promoting healthy competition, as well as collaboration between countries.

The FIRST Global Challenge is an annual robotics game that addresses one of the 14 Grand Challenges identified by the national engineering academies of the US, United Kingdom, and China. Each year, a different issue of global importance will take center stage as the theme of that year’s challenge, which will be held in a different nation across the world.

The challenge reflects how science and engineering, in an environment of cooperation, communication, and teamwork, can achieve transcendent actions and solve many of the great challenges humanity faces.

In July 2017, the first edition of the FIRST Global Challenge was held in Washington, where young people competed in a challenge about providing access to clean water. In that event, Team Mexico obtained third place.